Blender 2.78 .obj import via script
You need to get the context selected object as shown below:

import bpy
file_loc = 'C:\\Users\\MyComp\\Documents\\3Dobjects\\obj\\humans\\human_figure_JOINED.obj'
imported_object = bpy.ops.import_scene.obj(filepath=file_loc)
obj_object = bpy.context.selected_objects[0] ####&lt;--Fix
print('Imported name: ', obj_object.name)